Busy busy busy

If you've been desperately waiting for my weekly UIA status update, I'm sad to report that I'll no longer be posting those. You can track the team's progress via the development schedule page on the wiki. Never fear, if I have something interesting to share, I will make sure to post for you!

I've started helping out with Tasque maintenance, so I triaged a bunch of bugs and applied some patches. I think we'll be ready for a new release soon. I like working on Tasque; it's a fun project.

I installed openSUSE 11 Beta 3 in a VM last week. It's looking pretty good! The new intlclock applet is very cute with its weather integration. In openSUSE 10.3, I struggled a lot with package management...YaST's GTK+ interface was easy to use but crashed a lot, zypper had a very nice CLI but was ridiculously slow, and I ended up using the ncurses YaST UI, and leaving it up all day so that I could avoid the slow repository updates. In openSUSE 11, things are worlds better:

• Zypper is wicked fast, and is now my favorite way to manage packages. All it lacks is tab-completion of package names, but running `zypper se somepackage` is so fast that I don't mind too much. ;-)
• YaST's GTK+ interface has been updated to GTK2 (so it fits in with the rest of my desktop), no longer pops up a kabillion windows when you install packages (so I can, you know, use my computer while I install stuff), and seems really stable. I found some usability problems, but Sunday I wrote a patch and this morning Michael Meeks committed a modified version of it. YaST's GTK+ code was really easy to follow, by the way, considering I'd never looked at it before. Kudos to the YaST team!
  

I hope Firefox is better on openSUSE 11. Maybe it's just my crufty 10.3 install, but I've always had freezing/crashing issues with FF2 and FF3. It seems to be running fine in my openSUSE 11 VM, so I'll keep my fingers crossed. Looking forward to doing a clean install of openSUSE 11 on my main machine soon.

Oh and by the way, I'd like to toss out a quick immature Fuck You to Blogger for never auto-saving my posts, constantly crashing Firefox this morning, and having some weird display problem where the "Compose New Post" page has teeny tiny fonts. I guess I shouldn't care too much about the display of the page, since I apparently can't use it to write posts anymore. Normally FF3 restores the contents of text boxes after a crash, but for whatever reason this is not supported by Blogger. Hooray for using Tomboy as a text editor. :-/

Next, spiders...

Tomboy 0.10.2 Released; Please update your distro's packages if you want sync to work!

I just released Tomboy 0.10.2, which addresses a problem in newer distros where the output of `mount` has changed for FUSE shares.

This really needs to get into openSUSE 11, Ubuntu Hardy, etc, or else note synchronization works very poorly. If your distro has a policy of not taking new releases but you can take patches, here's a very simple patch against 0.10.1:

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/tomboy/branches/gnome-2-22/Tomboy/Synchronization/FuseSyncServiceAddin.cs?r1=1980&r2=2008&view=patch

I look forward to upgrading sync to use GIO or Conduit in the future so that we can avoid these areas of fragility in our code base.

Tomboy 0.11.0 released, et UIA

This morning I released the first development release in the 0.11.x series. Tomboy 0.11.0 features Boyd's Tasque add-in, the beginning of John Anderson's rewrite of the printing add-in (goodbye libgnomeprint!), and even a patch or two from our founding father. The new printing add-in lacks a few features, most notably text styling/formatting. We'll make sure to get it fixed before 0.12.0 is released, but if you want to see it fixed faster, patches are welcome. :-P

Last week didn't feel very productive at work. I made one commit and a table mapping winforms controls to UIA ControlTypes. I don't really understand where the time went. :-( How many hours did I lose wrestling with my Vista VM, or exploring the Mono implementation of the WebBrowser control? Fortunately, as the table shows, I have PLENTY of work to do! So I'd better get to it...

Mario Kart Wii Friend Code

Forgot to mention...got Mario Kart Wii. Beat all 50CC races but still can't beat Jordan. I don't think there's ever been a video game where I could beat my friends. :-)

Here's my Mario Kart friend code if anyone's into that junk:

3265-5667-2633

I'm too busy right now to rant about the absurdity of this friend code garbage. You can probably divine your own identical rant if you know that this 12-digit code is not the same as my 16-digit Wii friend code, which (as far as I can tell) is good for basically nothing.

UPDATE (sorry for planet spam): I'm not really playing much Mario Kart, so I haven't been putting in anybody's code. I left this post up because people seem to be using it as a resource to find other players. Don't expect me to join in, but please have fun!

UIA Status, All Moved In Edition

Moving was...exhausting. When I can find my camera, I'll post pictures of my new bedless office. In the mean time, here's what I've been up to in UIA Land:

Last couple of weeks

• Started work on UIA providers for CheckBox, Label, and NumericUpDown. Extracted common functionality into abstract base class suitable for most Winforms controls.
• Began writing tests of WindowProvider for Forms.
• Worked with Andres to get child controls, specifically Buttons, mapped from UIA to ATK. Fun refactoring of UIA<->ATK bridge. :-)
• A few dozen more unit tests of MS implementation, and associated fixes.
  

This week

• Compile list of all SWF controls we need to support, and work with Calvin on a schedule for implementing them.
• Fully implement the providers I started last week.
• Help with mapping signals/etc between UIA and ATK.